Lynn Klemmer is a multimedia artist.
She graduated at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin with a BA in Fine Art & Visual Culture (2017) and is an MA student in European Media Studies at the University of Potsdam.
Her art practice, involving various media, explores the boundary between the analog and the digital, humans and machines, as well as questions regarding the bond between images and meaning.
She is also a co-founder of Mnemozine, a Luxembourgish interdisciplinary research and
art collective which manifests itself as a platform for experiments in philosophy, sociology and contemporary art practice.
Wood, mixed media, 300x200cm
“Untitled Tranmission” is an installation consisting of a wooden sculpture resembling a high voltage tower placed in front of a greenscreen surrounded by lights.
The installation is meant to evoke a filmset in which the colour green acts as a referent to the greenscreen’s inherent possibility to bridge the gap between the fictional and the real, to technology more generally, but also to the natural world.
In this constellation I also reflect upon screens, which act as physical mirrors or, when turned on, as gates into the digital realm. While all elements have their own meaning, they form new semantic connections when put in relation to each other.
The work is supposed to be puzzling while being impressive due to its size. It acts as a reminder of the omnipresence and yet invisibility or non-apparentness of ubiquitous new media, phones, computers and interfaces, but also of the infrastructure of electricity itself.
Marshall McLuhan states “The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message.” Electricity is the best example of an infrastructure which dictates our everyday life while being completely invisible. We only see the infrastructures like cables and sockets, yet its actual power is felt only in non-apparent ways: as ripples of political conflict or as a commodity in the lifeworld.
Photos by Lynn Theisen. Exhibition View, Leap2022, Rotondes“The Mother of all Demons” is a selection of three digitally crafted images printed on faux leather, giving them a skin-like texture. To produce the images I disassembled my old personal computer and excavated the motherboard. A closeup of the circuit board is the starting point for the images which have been manipulated, distorted, glitched and layered in various programs. The straight lines of the motherboard turn into waves or flames and give the impression of chaos and ferocity. Rusty nails, gathered from burnt firewood, are used to pin the images onto the wall.
The images are a reflection on the natural side of technology and computers, highlighting and questioning the maternal and creative dimension of the term ‘motherboard’ (given for its hub-like quality and the possibility to insert extension-devices), as well as juxtaposing the solid green protective solder mask of a motherboard with the soft and pliable texture of leather.
The title, “The Mother of all Demons”, is a haunting reference to and reimagination of the “Mother of all Demos”, the first demonstration of many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computers by Douglas Engelbart in San Francisco in 1968.
Photo by Lynn Theisen. Exhibition View, LEAP2022, RotondesSparked by an epiphanic reading of Lisel Mueller’s poem “Monet refuses the operation”, this series of installations explores the possibility of reconsidering our engagement with the internet as a transcendent spatial experience in which the “world is [still] flux”. The poem reflects on Monet’s initial decision to not medically treat his cataract, a condition in which the eye becomes increasingly opaque, and how this refusal might even have benefited his painting. Mueller’s crucial insight is that an apparent flaw can create openings towards new experiential paradigms and even reveal the limitations of the purely functional order of things. Following this idea, the installations seek to shed a different light on what is effectively dismissed as non-sensical oddities in our habitual cyber-interactions: failed algorithmic pattern recognitions, dead links leading nowhere, bad gateways, pages without apparent functions, visual glitches or liminal, ‘dangerous’ hosts. These phenomena are gradually vanishing in the increasingly streamlined online experience on private platforms, a fact which may well be seen as the true cataract befalling the digital user: a growingly opaque interaction with a medium of untapped vivid possibility. The installations therefore attempt to make the viewer adventure into the repressed imaginary of the internet’s banished ruins without the aid of an interface.
Photo by Mike Zenari
A short film, shot entirely on a VHS-C movie camera, exploring the themes of neuroplasticity, electricity, and the magnetic field between images and meaning. It attempts to connect with the viewer through plot-charged image fragments and silent subtitles. The work is shown in a filmset-like installation containing references to the film’s imagery. Built as a walled-off room within a room, it invites the viewer to step outside the gallery space and step into a ‘virtual’ domestic space, or to exit the skull and enter the brain.
The title refers to neuropsychologist Donald Hebb, known for his discovery that adjacent neurons weld together through repeated experiences and thoughts. Extreme stress or trauma can produce paranoia, anxiety, schizophrenia, or other mental disorders.
In an emergency, the brain looks for patterns and connections, a phenomenon called apophenia, to protect itself from potential danger. Digital algorithms exhibit similar behaviour. When patterns rule, contingency becomes obsolete. However, in this meaning-charged equilibrium, a certain rogue voltage remains, like an electric current about to short circuit.
The language of this tension is what this movie tries to express.
